INNIS MOR: THE LARGEST OF THE ARAN ISLANDS
click on photo to enlarge
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48 TROJAN HERRINGS & TRIPIDIUM,
Foreword John Stezaker
Introduction Andrew Rawlinson
forthcoming Waterloo Press, 2008
SOPHIA WELLBELOVED was born in Dublin, the cover photo of her forthcoming 48 Trojan herrings & Tripidium shows her with her mother on Innis Mor, the largest of the Aran Islands off the west coast of Ireland, where they went to live when her father went to join the navy at the start of WW2. They lived in the cottage used in filming Robert J. Flaherty’s 1934 film Man of Aran.
She was a member of the Gurdjieff Society in London for about fourteen years, and her academic interest in western esotericism led her to explore Gurdjieff’s writing at London University. She has published Gurdjieff, Astrology & Beelzebub’s Tales, (Solar Bound, 2002) and Gurdjieff: the Key Concepts (Routledge, 2003), she is director of Lighthouse Editions, a small independent publishing company, a co-ordinator of the Cambridge Centre for the Study of Western Esotericism and lives in Cambridge, UK.
There are forty-eight short poems and Tripidium which is the second of a set of four poems which together are titled Praying for Flow. Here are some short poems from the book, and the first page and a bit of Tripidium.
followed by the list of contents. All poems © Sophia Wellbeloved.
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Her emanations ring like a child’s glass
harpsichord, her eyes and skin are clear
she offers a set of small domestic
difficulties on a porcelain plate
and I take one.
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The halo of light cast on the ceiling
is reflected in the window-pane,
projected out into the dawn sky.
Within its radiance the twiggy
top of a tree rests like Japanese
calligraphy on porcelain. Hours
of dazed looking into glass cases,
and centuries of bowl making come
together in this moment.
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I call upon the most high and the most
high comes into being. Like a sliver of
new moon it augments the night sky.
The ends of branches open and close
like gills letting the sky flow through
blue and speckley, everything I see
strokes my skin. lets me be.
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The poem which rose last night is waiting
to be skimmed, or I am waiting while the poem
lips into the skimming spoon, or my waiting is
the skimming process, or else the skimming
is the poem, the writing a trace of procedures.
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Five a.m., I see particles of dust
shining and swirling, pulled
into the shade of my
reading lamp, and expelled
smartly, floating at different
speeds. It is a shock to see them,
as though the dead were
suddenly and briefly made visible.
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Seven grains of salt sit on my right
palm like a constellation, they shine
translucent without glitter, I picked
them up idly with the tip of my left
hand middle finger and put them
there prior to throwing them away,
when I turn my hand from the light
they shine more brightly.
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What is a story? If a man’s hat blew off,
That would be archaic, hats don’t blow
off now, still, it would be an incident,
and if the hat were to be run over by a
bus that would be an extended incident,
but, if the hat began singing as the bus
ran over it “my eyes have seen the glory
of the coming of the Lord” that could be
the beginning of a story. If the hat blew
off and after a while the man forgot it,
that would be a whole story, archaic
and tragic.
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PRAYING FOR FLOW is the overall title of four inter-related poems:
Twisting From Within tracks the episodic descent of the poem as it falls onto the screen interrupted by mundane flows of daily life, by fears, dreams, stories and memories in an unending desire to question and understand, to settle once and forever the uncatchable flow of events, offering the microcosmic falls or drops which result from bailing with a sieve.
Tripidium takes its title from the name of an ancient liturgical dance of two steps forward and one back. The poem explores this pattern of dance in relation to the darting back and forth in relation to time, memory, emotion, pulses, tidal flows, cycles of weather, through a series of stories, instructions and conclusions, dictating responsibilities that alternately lull and disturb our awareness.
Senseless in the Empyrium is an ontological awakening to moments of presence and explores the fiction of separation between inner and outer, self and others. It acknowledges senselessness both as absence of awareness and the inability to make sense of this.
And in my Flesh focuses on experiencing the physical body’s functioning in relation to breath and emotions; liminal states between sleep and waking; changes in the body made during the reception of memories; the dance of the body as it seeks flexible, stability of functioning within and amongst these flows of life.
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T R I P I D I U M
One day when extremely ancient,
my dance creaky, I may be blessedly
deaf, to the cracking and snapping
of the small parts of me which are
still mobile, I will continue as now
to dance the tripidium, not some
thing you seek to learn, not the
imitation of the heavenly dance,
the tripidium angelorum of St Basil,
but the opening and closing of doors,
the involuntary entrance and inexplicable
exits that occur, and there is no making sense
of them except in the beat of their flow,
the change of vision that they offer.
Forward, forward, back,
forward, forward, back,
as in the lapping of the tides,
the displacement of sand and seaweed
the taking away and the bringing back
There were two youths who will now
be old, or dead, one hovered on the
verge of our group, in an ontological
shiver, and his drawings were the same,
never quite there, once we met him
at the edge of the heath and he said
he was drawing from walls and flames
as Leonardo recommended, his spirit
lapped palely in his stolid body.
The other had protruding eyes rolling
between the curtaining folds of his lids,
he had a damp atmosphere, a brackish
smell, these fragments of them are
among the thousands of similar ones
in my dark larder of jars;
held as specimens, not for
medical or criminal record, but stored
there for some future use, which seems
to be this, a re-gathering or an inner census,
which brings everyone home even if
incomplete, in body bags of memory,
bits of them left on the field with
their scarlet jackets absorbing
and obscured by mud.
Some are Pana-Vista-Chroma-Vision
wide-screen people like Napoleon,
or other actors, indistinguishable now
from former clipped and silent
beings whose total lives are lived
outside the one tracking shot I
have of them.
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TITLES
1. The poem which rose last night is waiting
2. Five a.m., I see particles of dust
3. Seven grains of salt sit on my right
4. What is a story? If a man’s hat blew off,
5. As I stir in my chair it makes
6. God forgot to teach us how to turn and spin
7. If I had a clay pipe I could suck on it
8. The seventeenth reminds me of my brother,
9. When I came home covered in blood my mother
10. My hands appear on the keys, the right hand
11. Subjects go by like minor stations as
12. Waking from a dream of being lost
13. In separation we can be distinguished,
14. Still wrapped in sleep I open the door, looking
15. These gods could not be anything but Greek,
16. A decade ago in Berlin there were women
17. Clouds as lonely as a single person in the park
18. In here the air is thick, dusty with darkness
19. Long ago my heart’s gates were made secure
20. I am
21. Time chews on me like a locust:
22. It was unexpected your head coming down,
23. I might be more pavonine, now that I know
24. All rivers run towards their own oblivion
25. Into the ghostly body of my mother I
26. Every now and then I do not long for
27. You took your own toenails out with pliers
28. Now that the tide has gone out we could
29. This Uccello bird sits
30. So the narrative is a snake skin
31. She looks lacy, frail like a plant
32. His words come whirling out, fast
33. In the library, or the sitting room
34. When I talked to her on the phone I could
35. I get the sense of a leaden worm within her
36. Her emanations ring like a child’s glass
37. There are other ghosts, the ones who live
38. Thursday is the right day to set out on long
39. The halo of light cast on the ceiling
40. The topmost fan of the tree undulates
41. The roof has an heraldic diagonal
42. O Plum! I fear you are not as the label
43. Finding skewed evidence of an old world *
44. The interval between these beings’ *
45. You see the golden hills, not the rucked tracks
46. What the music does is spit itself
47. Hundreds and hundreds of milk-green
48. I call upon the most high and the most
49. Note re Praying For Flow
50. Tripidium
*note: these poems arose from seeing found images in John Stezaker’s 3rd Person Archive, forthcoming Walter Walter König, 2008.
